2006-10-26

Fantasy Moguls: Join Today! Seriously, Join Today

Thanks to Bookpusher for pointing out Fantasy Moguls, a site that lets you play movie mogul for a few months. According to the site's About page, the game is

Similar to fantasy football, but instead of being a "general manager" of a fantasy football "team," you are the "CEO" of a fantasy movie "studio." You and your friends will draft movies for your fantasy studios and how well these real movies perform in certain real-life statistical categories (like total box office and review score) is how well your fantasy studio performs against the other fantasy studios in your league. For example, when Talladega Nights makes 51 million over the weekend, it makes 51 million for your fantasy studio. If you were smart enough to draft it.

100% FREE to play, the game takes place over the Holiday season and you can join a private or public league.

Sadly, I missed my opportunity to join Gregg's league, but I'm inspired to start one for Pop & its readers. I've never played in a fantasy league of any kind before, so don't be shy about joining if you've never played, either! It'll be a learning experience for us all.

I know so many people (okay, so far, they're all guys, but maybe Susan will change that!) who love playing fantasy sports, and it's a world that's always fascinated me, so if you're tired of being on the outside & looking in, here's your chance! Instructions may be found here, and an exhaustive Draft Kit (for the obsessive) is here.

1.) Go to the site and sign up. Use your real name (I did), use a fake name, use your grandmother's name -- makes no difference to me!2.) Choose “Join a Public League”3.) Scroll down all the way until you find “Pop Goes the Library” as a league name. That’s ours.4.) That’s it. We technically “draft” our movies for the holiday season tonight at 8 PM EST, but the system automatically drafts the highest rated movie on the board if you’re not present, so you don’t even have to worry about it if you don’t want to. We’ll all have our movie slate on Friday, and it keeps track of our box office numbers until the end of January.

Smack talking, as always, is encouraged. The frillier & more anachronistic, the better.

By the way, that Wikipedia article linked above contains the following tidbit, emphasis mine:

It's estimated by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association that 16 million adults inthe U.S., age 18 to 55, play fantasy sports. Fantasy sports is also popularthroughout the world with leagues for soccer, cricket and other non-U.S. basedsports.

I wonder how many of them are library users. Does your library have materials on fantasy league play? Does your library permit online access to or block fantasy league websites?

If this looks fun to you, you could play at your library, either as a staff project, or (much better still) as an extension of any movie-related programming you run at the library. It's a great way to keep the discussion going outside of the library & library events. I bet teens would love it, too.

10 Comments:

How cool! I will admit that I am one of the millions of fantasy sports players. I've often wondered about applying the concept to non-sports arenas (you could just as easily do books and NYT standings, etc.) and this sounds like fun!

Yeah, it's a great idea, and totally would transfer to books, music, a slew of library-applicable items!

Now that I've set up our league (thanks for joining, btw), I wish I'd set it up for Ultimate Mogul instead of the regular one, because the Ultimate version includes reviews, IMDB comments, and other non-monetary factors. The way we're playing, it's all about the Benjamins, baby.

That's funny, because Josh was the one who pointed me towards you guys not too long ago!

I've played fantasy sports before when I worked in a sports-crazy office, but I found that it took too much time to really be good at it. You have to know the players, research them, know if they're facing a tough opponent this week, etc.

Here, it's something that almost all of us can relate to - movies - and the game isn't as zero-sum. In fantasy sports, if a player does well, that means someone else on the other team did poorly. Films are much more open, so you're not necessarily in direct competition against each other. If that makes sense.

Argh. You'd think that a person whose favorite math class ever was calculus could master simple arithmetic, but no. I wanted to make the sign-up time 8 PM eastern, but fouled up the adding of three hours.

Draft is in progress, but every time I try to draft a film, I'm told it's not my turn. Clearly, I have much to learn.

Unfortunately, yes. Who knew we'd be so popular (no pun intended)? Each league has only 8 players, so if you can't see Pop Goes The Library on the league list, that means we're full up.

We are having some serious technical difficulties in the draft -- in short, no-one has been able to draft a single film yet -- and I sent a call for help to the support staff. Here's hoping it'll all be sorted by the end of the weekend.

About

We're public, school, and academic librarians. We believe libraries can learn from and use Pop Culture to improve their
collections, services, and public image. We love TV, music, the movies, comic books, anime, magazines, sports, tech, and oh yeah: reading!

We hope this blog is helpful to you -- please let us know what kind of
coverage will make the biggest difference to you & your users!